


Not a Gentle Laughter

by nevermindirah



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Genocide, Grief/Mourning, Healthy Coping Mechanisms, Hopeful Ending, Jewish Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Jewish traditions, Purim, Survival, Team as Family, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29795361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevermindirah/pseuds/nevermindirah
Summary: A meditation on celebrating survival amid crisis.Or, 5 times Booker got so wasted he couldn't tell the difference between "blessed is Mordechai" and "cursed is Haman" and one time he didn't.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27





	Not a Gentle Laughter

It is early in the spring. The brown and sober trees of winter have put on gleaming costumes of bright green — not the darker, sedate green of later spring, but a sparkling elfin green. People act a little crazy — shedding heavy clothes while there is still a chill in the air, laughing a little wildly when there is no reason. The tyrant winter is not quite overthrown, but he is smelling musty.

Into this moment comes Purim, the Festival of Lotteries, the hilarious noisemaker among all the holy days, the day of merriment and buffoonery, parody and satire, the loony day of full moon in the pre-spring month of Adar. But the laughter of Purim is not a gentle laughter: it is a kind of angry, blood-red humor that celebrates the tyrant's overthrow.

For of course Purim recalls the tyrant Haman who would have murdered all the Jews — remembers that he cast lots with our lives, remembers that his own stupidity and greed would not have been enough to save us without the courage and tenacity of Mordechai and Esther. So even as a festival of merriment, Purim has its bloodier, darker underside of fear and fury.

— Arthur Waskow, _Seasons of Our Joy_

### Monday, March 1, 2021 | 17 Adar 5781

A lonely writer sits down to imagine happier times. This time last year they were putting the finishing touches on their Purim costume when the party got cancelled, and within a week everything else in their life got cancelled too. Here they sit, eleven and a half months later, on the same couch they've been sitting on, all alone, all this time.

Will Purim 2022 be different? Will the lonely writer have someone to kiss after the spiel, after such a very long time without any kisses at all? Will they laugh loudly at the already-tired jokes delivered by a rabbi dressed up as Dr. Anthony Fauci, just out of relief to hear others' laughter in person once more?

Will the writer take a quiet moment to themself while waiting in line at the bar and check their Tumblr notifications — will they suddenly find themself missing the endless days where everyone was online all the time because that's all any of us had?

Purim is joyful, artistic, drunken revelry in memory of near-annihilation. It's pleasure and pain.

It's no wonder, then, that the writer sat down to write a crack fic about a beautiful dumbass who binge drinks to cope, and found themself stumbling into meditative angst instead. Don't worry, there will be hope and romance in the end — after all, the writer clings to this fiction in the exact same way as our erstwhile POV character clings to his whiskey.

The writer is tempted to say that this Purim is different from all other Purims, but first of all that is a different holiday (and the writer would like you to know Booker Passover Headcanons are coming, [pls like and subscribe](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/)). Beyond that, no, this Purim is not different from all other Purims. We have faced crisis during seasons of our joy before. Some of us survived before, and some of us will survive again, and every year, whatever our struggles, even when some of us individually are too busy just surviving to celebrate, our traditions will live on.

It is in this spirit that we observe five times that Booker got so drunk on Purim that he couldn't tell the difference between blessed is Mordechai and cursed is Haman, and one time he didn't.

### Sunday, March 17, 1946 | 14 Adar II 5706

WE LIVED, BITCHES.

Sébastien le Livre might have been this character's first fake name, having changed it from Levy as a teenager, a few short years before the Emancipation that made life both easier and harder for the people he came from. He spends Purim 1946 in a DP camp, drunk out of his mind with people who are happy to have him there, despite their lingering in this demeaning place evidence of his failure to forge them adequate papers to see them safely to new homes.

There are spiels and costumes and noisemakers and dancing and laughter, and gifts, such as they are, and as many overindulgences of food and drink as they can manage. And burbling underneath it all, a defiant, devastating rage.

And in quiet corners there are those who cannot bear to celebrate, not now. Maybe not ever again. There are those who only drink to forget.

There is no comparing devastations, only blank-faced empathy as our protagonist turns away to rejoin the revelry and give privacy to those who, like him, but not at all like him, have lost every single person they have ever loved.

### Tuesday, March 21, 1837 | 14 Adar II 5597

Jean Pierre is dead. The sweet boy who always wanted to play Mordechai in the spiel is dead and buried, and he was a full-grown man who knew his own mind when he made it clear he did not want his father to say kaddish for him.

Booker, as his new family have taken to calling him, had no intention to observe any of the holidays his mother taught him so carefully. Jewish holidays are not meant to be celebrated alone. Not even on Yom Kippur are we to isolate ourselves from others. But here he is, cut off from his blood and his people, thrown together with these ancient strangers who welcome him but do not understand him.

None of them said I told you so, at least not in as many words, when he returned to them last year. They teach him their ways and tease him for his youth and treat him as one of them. But they don't understand his grief. They find his facility with new technologies useful but they treat the modern world as a blip in time and his perspective as a phase that will pass. Surely they would laugh if he explained his longing for a holiday of silly costumes and playacting and drunken shouting down of a long-dead villain.

Tonight is Purim and Booker started drinking well before sundown in hopes that he may forget.

But then over dinner Yusuf mentions something about a Jewish friend of his from long ago, from a time he and Nicolò spent in Cairo in the late 12th century.

His friend Maimonides.

 _The_ Maimonides.

Booker and his many siblings could never afford to spend time in yeshiva. His childhood love of reading what few books he could get his hands on turned quickly to precocious talent for stealing and repairing and selling them. He's far from a scholar, but even he has heard of Maimonides.

Late into the night he and Yusuf and Nicolò and Andromache pour more wine and laugh over stories around the fire. Booker counts it as a mitzvah, to celebrate the holiday in community, and to open his heart to what this new family might yet be.

### Wednesday, February 28, 2018 | 14 Adar 5778

Booker is in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He and Joe text almost every day, but he hasn't seen him or Nicky in months, and a single postcard is all the contact he's had with Andy in over a year. The days pass in a blur and all he knows is that it's springtime when he sees the news. The Israeli military is shooting live ammunition at Palestinians demonstrating peacefully at the Gaza border fence. Among those they've killed are a medic and a journalist.

Booker doesn't know what he feels about Zionism anymore. The staggering joy of seeing Hebrew come alive again, the breathless hope of a modern country that would guarantee a new home — that would guarantee a _permanent_ home — to those still languishing in camps, unable to return to burned houses and murderous neighbors, unable to find other countries willing to take them in.

But also the wordless rage, the betrayal. A people without a land taking a land that already had other people on it and claiming it as theirs alone. A few bloody-minded men who claimed to have his people's best interests at heart slaughtering thousands for not being Jewish, expelling millions more.

"What is hateful to you, do not do to others. That is the whole Torah. Now go and study." And he did. Booker has had two centuries to become a scholar: literature and science and politics and just about anything he can get his hands on. He still has not gone to yeshiva, spending his time instead in a second and third French Revolution and dozens, hundreds of strangers' wars. He knows the banality of war, knows his people are not inherently more moral than anyone else. It breaks his heart all the same.

He can't help but remember that desperate, manic Purim in 1946. He wonders if he shouted down Haman's name that night with people whose own grandchildren are now the villains in another people's story.

Joe and Nicky would say it didn't have to be this way, that wrongs could not be taken back but they could be righted. But when he spoke of the Revolution they never seemed to understand why a government would hold such emotion for him, so by the time Israel came to be, he'd long since learned not to speak of nationalism with his family. Another secret to add to the pile.

He can't remember if it's Purim or Passover or that Israeli military holiday or what. His bones are telling him a Jewish holiday starts at sundown tonight but he refuses to look it up. This year he will betray his mother twice over by sitting alone at this touristy bar on Rue Bourbon of all godforsaken places and drinking not to remember, but to forget.

### Wednesday, February 26, 2127 | 14 Adar 5887

They're in what's left of the Alps, which he never thought he'd live to see devoid of snow, let alone strip mined. The sight gives Booker pause, but he finds he's not sad, not exactly. This mission is a good one. Andy likes to remind them that if you live long enough, you will see new mountains form, and what matters more is that the people who live in the foothills survive to the next generation.

He's decades and light years past the itch to drink on missions. Tonight is Purim, and it will be a dry one.

They're not yet finished setting up their tents that evening when Nicky begs off to start making dinner, a glint in his eye Booker chooses not to wonder about just yet. When Booker sits down around the fire he sees every member of his family with a grin on their face and a gragger in hand. Nicky is wearing a beret and a fake moustache.

"Chag sameach, babe," Nile says, her American vowels gliding comfortably between the Hebrew consonants she's long since mastered.

He feels no shame as he cries around the fire that night, grateful for these people and his life and another moment to share each other's stories.

### Wednesday, March 14, 2063 | 14 Adar 5823

Nile's so excited to see him. They talk all the time, video call when they can, but she hasn't had her arms around him in three years.

She's a little nervous too, though. Purim sounds like a blast, but she hasn't seen Booker drink more than a single glass of wine — and only then occasionally, and just at Shabbat dinner — since that time decades ago when her entire life had just fallen apart and she met a shell of a person who was chugging bourbon in between being kind to her and burning his life to the ground.

They've been together _like that_ for coming up on twenty years now — the butterflies are different now than they were when this was new. So why these old butterflies again now?

Oh, right. Of course she's nervous. The last time they went to a costume party together was 2044, when after years of talking off and on they met up in New York City for an over-the-top Halloween party, and the next morning their Storm and Thor costumes were strewn across the floor and their friendship was no longer just a friendship.

Andy, Quỳnh, Joe, and Nicky are her family, and she loves them dearly. But there are some things that they just don't _get_ about her, not in the way Booker does.

That's what had her double-texting him at first, insisting they could still be friends despite how badly he'd fucked up. There's a hell of a lot more between the two of them now than just the shared life experience of modern immortals who carry the weight of their ancestors, but it's still one of the things she treasures the most about their friendship. Sometimes she carries her ancestors like a teddy bear, dangling them by the hand as she runs off to explore everything the world has to offer, or clutching them to her chest for comfort. Sometimes it all feels like an albatross around her neck, all these boundaries and expectations for her life set long before she was born, and to ignore it would be naive or a betrayal but maybe a relief as well. It's not the only or most important thing about her, but it's _there_ , all the time, an essential part of her. Booker is the only one of their little family who _understands_.

Anyway, that was decades ago now. A lifetime ago. She's jittery with butterflies, not overwhelm, certainly not dread. Tonight is going to be a good night.

It's not her first time in Morocco, but it will be her first time in Fez, where Booker is spending this decade educating teenagers in languages and literature and that sport that they will never agree on the name of. (Yes, football makes more sense as a name for a sport where you primarily touch the ball with your feet. No, she will not admit as much for a thousand more years at least.)

She and Quỳnh had the best damn time doing the research for Nile's Purim costume. Doña Gracia Nasi was an absolute badass. So what if the corset underneath her gorgeous blue brocade dress is a little anachronistic? This _is_ a sex vacation, after all.

At the airport she leaps into his arms and he dips her for a kiss like they're in a romcom and everything is perfect and nothing hurts and despite all the pain she is grateful for the long and messy life that brought her to this place and time.

He takes her out for lunch and then cooks her dinner and in between shows her a handful of spots she knows she'll want to return to over the next week of her trip. They have a quickie while dinner's in the oven, and thank God, because they both got it in their heads to surprise each other with their Purim costumes and Nile is still way too much her mother's daughter to have sex in the bathroom at a house of worship.

At least _she_ is dressed appropriately for a party that includes children.

Booker is wearing a Captain America costume. Which is hilarious, sure, but it's not the star-spangled one children all over the world recognize thanks to good ol' American cultural imperialism, Now With More Diversity™. It's a Sam Wilson Falcon costume right out of the 1970s comics, with the v-neck down to the navel.

Nile Freeman was raised to act a certain way in a house of worship. She loves her cranky Jewish Frenchman to hell and back, but sometimes it feels like God put him on this earth just to test her.

She's got her tits shoved half-way up her neck in this 16th century gown, and _Booker is showing off more cleavage than she is_.

The evening starts with a round of drinks and the three-sided cookies Booker taught her how to make a few years ago and introductions to some of his favorite people in his latest temporary home. Many of his favorite people are very small children who are very excited to see the living embodiment of a comic book character he's apparently told them all about while he was helping out with Hebrew school.

Nile is fine. Thanks for asking.

There's a spiel, something between a play and a series of skits, featuring the kids in all kinds of Biblical and modern costumes. Nile gets about two thirds of the jokes and Booker explains the rest to her in between cheering for all his tiny friends. It's raucus and warm and both a radical departure and a spiritual twin to the boisterousness of the AME church her mom kept taking them to every week no matter how far away they moved.

After the spiel and some blessings and speeches that are legible to Nile as religious rituals, the young children are ushered home, and the teenagers are led to a different part of the synagogue for what Booker tells her will be heavily-supervised revelry with no alcohol but plenty of marijuana, leaving the adults to get blasted like it's 2099. This is unlike any religious observance Nile has ever taken part in.

Nile is DRUNK. This is great Purim is _great_ Nile is having _so much fun_ her cheeks hurt from laughing the rabbi and her wife just introduced themselves with _shots_ Nile should probably drink some water—

God _damn_ , Booker looks good in that costume.

Nile settles down for a while, because there's a second spiel just for grownups now that everybody who's indulging tonight is nice and sauced. Thank God Nile learned Arabic from Joe and Nicky, because otherwise she would be missing out on a lot of hilarious sexual innuendo in what still blows her mind is a sincere religious ritual. She's very proud of herself for paying such good attention to the spiel even though she looks amazing in this dress and it fans out so pretty when she spins and Booker is right here where she can put her arms around him.

Booker looks so pretty in his Falcon costume.

All those muscles.

Pretty boy.

Soft.

Smells nice.

Mmm, _lick_.

Nile honest-to-God _licks Booker's biceps_ right there in temple in front of God and Queen Esther and a bunch of Booker's friends who will be giving him shit for this for as long as he lives here in Fez.

Nile and Booker's family will be giving the both of them shit for this for as long as they live. In sixty-some years, their family will tease them about this around a campfire in the Alps. Centuries from now, this will be one of the many stories of joy and pain and survival that they pass down to the next generation. As Nile will say in about four hundred years, drunk off her ass telling this story to her new little sibling: l'fucking'chayim.

**Author's Note:**

> [Doña Gracia Nasi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracia_Mendes_Nasi) was an absolute badass who saved a lot of our people from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal by orchestrating an escape network that got hundreds of people to safety in the Ottoman Empire. She lived about half a century before [Catherine de Medici brought corsets from Italy and popularized them in Western Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_corsets).
> 
> I did more googling about corset history than about Jewish holiday observances in post-Holocaust displaced persons camps, because I can only cry so much in a day goddamnit. Please correct me in the comments if I've gotten anything wrong about Purim 1946.
> 
> I think Quỳnh would absolutely adore Doña Gracia Nasi as a heroine fighting against the same shit that sent Quỳnh to the bottom of the ocean, and at about the same time in history. I like to think Nile and Quỳnh would do a lot of bonding over catching up on the history that Andy, Joe, and Nicky lived through but that Quỳnh missed out on due to ocean prison and Nile wasn't born for yet and that US public schools almost certainly didn't give her much information on. Plus, you know, corsets ;)
> 
> This is Booker's [1970s Sam Wilson costume](https://www.marvel.com/characters/falcon-sam-wilson/in-comics).
> 
> [Yusuf al Kaysani was personal friends with Maimonides and you cannot convince me otherwise.](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/post/627362250904256512/yusuf-al-kaysani-was-friends-with-maimonides-not) Not to cheapen the work of one of my people’s most influential and beloved thinkers, but dude wrote The Treatise on Resurrection around 1190 after getting caught up in controversy about what he really thought about resurrection, and depending on who you believe he might have changed his mind about immortality sometime in the late 12th century. Maimonides wrote extensively about medicine and Greek and Islamic philosophy as well as just like extremely important Jewish texts, all in Arabic/Judeo-Arabic, and he was born in Córdoba around 1138 when Iberia was ruled by Amazigh Muslims, and he lived most of his adult life in what are now Morocco and Egypt.
> 
> When I looked it up part-way through drafting this, I found [the Great March of Return](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_protests) started a month later than I'd remembered. The first of what became over a year of weekly protests for the rights of Palestinians to return to land they were expelled from happened around Passover, not Purim. The Israeli army really did shoot live ammunition at peaceful protesters gathering near the Gaza border fence, killing at least 110 people and wounding more than 13,000 in the first few months of demonstrations.
> 
> I sat down fully intending to write crack fic and this angst with a happy ending spilled out instead. My enduring thanks to the Book of Nile group chat on Tumblr for being an all-around goddamn delight, and in particular for "Mmm, pretty boy. Soft. Lick."
> 
> Update: Shout-out to [this meta](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/post/642823580470624256/lucyclairedelune-concept-nile-and-booker-go-to-a) and [this art](https://strangehighs.tumblr.com/post/643118819038150656/concept-nile-and-booker-go-to-a-costume-party) for the Thor and Storm costumes. The idea of our youngest immortals carrying the weight of their ancestors comes from [this post that I like to think of as the Book of Nile Manifesto 2.0](https://nevermindirah.tumblr.com/post/638410266455965696/but-my-brain-is-eaten-alive-by-book-of-nile-these).


End file.
